Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba.

“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”

Case had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient way to conceal his cobra; finally he’d settled for tucking the handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting across his stomach.

Get your mind out of the gutter V.

When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend.

He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.

“Listen to the fear. Maybe it’s your friend.”

“What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.”

I think of yours, V.

COLD STEEL ODOR. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. . . .

“That’s where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood, too. Blood ’cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff, I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn’t have to open anything up for the main show.”

She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.

I need this but only from you.

“How’s that? You want one?” He held the pill out to her. “Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.” She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. “You’re biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.”

Well, I guess that's one way to deal with addictions.

“You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They’re dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You’re already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin.

“You have time to do what I’m hiring you for, Case, but that’s all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you’ll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you’re back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.”

Tighter than an eel’s ass,

Do eels have asses? Do they have buttholes? The 8th wonder of the world

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

It’s crazy how much this guy influenced. Movies like the Matrix. He invented the concept of cyberspace and the matrix. I’m starting to see why people call William Gibson the father of Cyberpunk. With that being said, there were others to help lay the ground work like Philip K. Dick and such.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

simstim

Simulated Stimulation. A digital representation of the thoughts and feelings of another person. One individual is fitted with a simstim rig that broadcasts their senses to another person, who then rides along in their brain

ice

Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. This refers to cybersecurity and firewalls.

microsoft,

Metal slivers (not unlike USBs) which contain code that people can insert into ports in their head, modifying their vision and their cognitive abilities. Much of modern society is oriented around technology, and many people have modified their bodies with technology. This technology, like the microsofts, adds layers to a user’s vision or perception, allowing them to essentially run different applications inside their own mind.

precis.”

A briefing. Specifically. a report generated by a deck based on research it has done independently. Technology makes it easy for Case to do research. In the 1980s, the idea that a computer could create a comprehensive brief on any topic by scouring the internet was cutting edge.

Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

Only 85%? I would try it.

Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.

It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses.

He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models.

“I seen the schematics on the guy’s silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see. I figure he could narrow it to a pulse and fry a retina over easy.”

“You have told this to your woman friend?” Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. “In Turkey, women are still women. This one . . .” The Finn snorted. “She’d have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her cross-eyed.”

He’s a kind of compulsive Judas. Can’t get off sexually unless he knows he’s betraying the object of desire. That’s what the file says. And they have to love him first. Maybe he loves them, too.

Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera’s face, once. “No, baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I’ll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that.”

When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine.

Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja.

I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity’s brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re dealing with a small part of the man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.”

Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her engulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.

“I wanna buzz,” he said to the blue artifice of the sky. “I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver; little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.”

I will get high to this

“This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear.

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. .

He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think.

Big same.

That’s king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it’ll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin’ the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick is.”

And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

The cores told me our intelligences are mad. And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept.

“We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.”

Not like Armitage’s madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke.

There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.